What Your Cell Phone is Really Planning

I know. That’s akin to admitting that I’ve given up bathing and that I’m harboring a secret desire to kidnap babies and love them and hug them and name them George. I’m kidding, of course. I wouldn’t call them George. Not all of them, at any rate.

The cell phone thing is true, however.

I could tell you that I don’t have one because I heard from my cousin’s boyfriend’s sister who found out about it from this guy in her class who read about it on the internet or something, that they cause brains to explode.

That would be untrue. You shouldn’t trust everything you read on the internet.

I could also tell you that I don’t have one because I am really absent-minded, and that I lose stuff all the time, and can’t really afford to replace a cell phone eight times a month. It’s true, I can’t afford to replace a cell phone 104 times a year, even with unlimited texts.

Maybe the real truth is that I’ve become quite proud of my strange little quirk, this weird streak of Luddite-ism from someone who has an obvious geekly pedigree? I could say that I’m so enamored of my own unique and bizarre little foibles that I cling to them like a drowning rat on a matchbook floating in the debris of a sinking ship in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

There might be some truth to that.

Perhaps I am really just afraid the my legions of obsessed fans will find my cell phone number, and call me at all hours, preventing me from sleeping until I have completed the long awaited sequel to my best-selling vampire novel.

I wish.

All of these ideas are actually much better than the real reasons.

In fact, having articulated a number of very intriguing reasons why I don’t have a cell phone, I think that it would simply be a disappointment if I were to give you the real reason. This all builds up my quirky writer mystique, which ought to come in useful when I am interviewed on the Today Show and the totally blitzed hosts of the 16th hour of the show ask about my “infamous” lack of a cell phone in today’s day and age.

It’ll be something that the Wikipedia editors will fight over with regards to my very own entry, and one will delete it as mere “rumor invented to increase book sales,” and another will cite some semi-sketchy source that merely copies part of this column as a reference.

Maybe I should build a bunch of websites, which all have that exact same text, hidden on random pages, and say I have nothing to do with them, but, darkly refer to these sites as evidence that the cell phones are all plotting together and building those sites. I would then tell you this is part of their sinister plan to take over the world by turning everyone to zombies and controlling all the information on the Internet. I would then tell you this is the real reason, no, I’m totally not lying now, this is the real reason I don’t own any kind of cell phone.